Album Review: Lil'
Wayne, "Rebirth"

January 15, 2010

BY JIM DeROGATIS POP
MUSIC CRITIC

While many hip-hop fans will
challenge the artistic validity of
the oft-repeated claim by New
Orleans' Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.
that he's "the best rapper alive,"
his commercial accomplishments are
undeniable: His last album, "Tha
Carter III" (2008), sold more than
three million copies, garnered eight
Grammy nominations and gave us one
of the silliest guilty-pleasure hits
of recent years with "Lollipop." But
through it all, just like all the
NBA and NFL stars who dream of
trading places with him, the artist
known as Lil Wayne has harbored a
secret desire: He just wants to
rock, man.

With a release date
that's been pushed back half a dozen
times since January 2009, Weezy's
"rock album" was starting to seem
more like a myth than a set of new
music. But now that it's actually
set to arrive in record stores on
Feb. 2, it's obvious that it's
actually a wildly misguided
experiment that would have been
better off remaining a rumor,
especially since it's likely to be
the rapper's last statement before
reporting for a year in jail on
charges of gun possession.

Some of the biggest problems are
the same ones plaguing much of Lil
Wayne's catalog: the annoying
Auto-Tuned sing-speak of his
choruses, the empty sexual boasts
and clichéd street bragging of his
rhymes, and the generic quality of
many of his beats. The new twists
are that those rhythms are delivered
by a live, stomping rhythm
section--though that hardly makes
them more appealing--and they're
decorated by a lot of hackneyed
hair-metal guitar wank, as well as
the occasional flourish of
Queen-like glam-rock and Coldplay-style
arena melodrama.

"This is that rock s---/This is
hip-hop, b---," Wayne chants at one
point, seemingly oblivious to the
contradiction. Or maybe he's just
setting up the argument he'd like
the album to inspire. But "is it
rock or is it rap" isn't the real
question here; that would be, "How
could anyone have thought this
forced, joyless, plodding
Frankenstein's mess was worth the
trouble of releasing?"